When the omega nugget fell into the chimp enclosure at Brentwood Academy, the chimps all gathered around it and began to poke at it’s shiny coating. Some of the chimps wanted to push it out of the enclosure, better to leave it to the humans. Some of the chimps wanted to put it into the water moat at the south end of the enclosure and drown it. One of the chimps, Bobo; wanted it for himself. So he snatched it up and secreted it with his private stash of fruits and random implements that fell into the Chimps’ cage during the day.

Bobo studied the Nugget at every chance he could, he fingered it’s designs and tried to puzzle out what it was for. It was small, metal and yellow. It had scribbled words all over it; like a human tool, but it wasn’t designed for hands like theirs were. It was just a lump of metal with words on it; but it hummed and pulsed like it was alive when you held it just so.

The other chimps lost interest in it until they go near it; Bobo noticed that when he held it he could read the signs around the cages and understood the Humans when they spoke (more than he could when he wasn’t near the chunk. He even grew to realize that he had put it with his secret food stash so that he wouldn’t forget about it when he wasn’t near it, like the other chimps.

Day by day, Bobo became more and more aware of himself. He began to try to imitate the speech of the humans that visited the Brentwood Academy and make himelf understood. He never let the humans see the Nugget, it was for him alone. He’d gesture at the children and they would whoop and clap when he would gutter “Hey you! Throw me a bit of fruit and I’ll dance for you!”

The guards and keepers started to take an interest in Bobo and so Bobo decided that he would only perform when there were kids around and alone; so that the keepers wouldn’t take him out of the enclosure. He felt sure that when he left the enclosure, it would have to be on his own terms.

The Nugget had been subtly chaning too; it started to look a bit like a rough outline of a brain, with a band around it. Bebo didn’t know that this was a brain though, just that it changed.

The other chimps came to shun Bebo, as he was just “different” now. They would share his food though, but then shy away or openly attack him if there was no food around. Bebo came to realize that if they Keepers saw him being unsocial, they would take him away from the Nugget.

One day, Bebo decided that it was time to leave the enclosure, and using a but of sharp metal he hid himself in the back of the enclosure, away from the eyes of the humans, he shaved himself bald and using some clothes dsiguised himself as a lanky child. Hiding the nugget in his pocket, Bobo leaped from the enclsoure close to closing time and hid amongst a crowd as they left.

The papers were filled with stories of the performing Ape who had been stolen from the Brentwood Academy; but Bebo was never seen at the Academy Again again.

It may even be possible that President Medvedev wrote these on his own:

A heavy decision weighed on my shoulders. Taking into account the freely expressed views of the Ossetian and Abkhazian peoples, and based on the principles of the United Nations charter and other documents of international law, I signed a decree on the Russian Federation’s recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. I sincerely hope that the Georgian people, to whom we feel historic friendship and sympathy, will one day have leaders they deserve, who care about their country and who develop mutually respectful relations with all the peoples in the Caucasus. Russia is ready to support the achievement of such a goal.

The western media is full of “New Cold War” talk over the rapidly escalating level of rhetoric between Russia and Nato. Which is a shame, I hate to credit Ronald Reagan with anything, but even he could see the value in an end to the ongoing MAD games that were going on between Russia/USSR and the USA/Nato. Here we are at the end of another 8 year reign of a Conservative and the world is in Flames, almost literally. The incurious and aggressive politics of the Bush administration have led the world right back towards a possible return to ongoing (and very real) fears of a nuclear war (of some form) in our lifetime. Something I had hoped had died in the middle of the Clinton Administration. The madmen of the past, it seems, given the reigns cannot help themselves.

The US election continues to turn on a wheel that maddens me and confuses me all at once. Faced with a choice between a young black guy who (for all intents and purposes) represents little change from the status quo and an Old White Guy who represents more of the same, they choose more of the same. The reasons behind this are fairly clear (crazy as they are) and not the least of which is “Invisible Men”

The folks I’ve posted here are nice people, and I’ve held them up for some ridicule, but only because of their motivations, not their goals. Their goals (though I disagree with them) appear moral on their face: “Saving Babies.”

Cute Baby

Who can honestly argue that babies shouldn’t be saved, babies are so cute, right? They come from their mom and need all the care and comfort in the world just to survive and represent the hope for the future, right?

So there we have the sensible and secular motivation to save babies, they are cute, they have potential and represent the ongoing future of humanity.

That is almost never the face presented by the anti-abortion folks, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one protest that used that kind of sane reasoning it’s always the same: “Abortion is Murder, Let’s Pray”

The folks at the DNC are no different. Wrapping yourself in a selpuchure and walking out to say that this or that is moral or immoral because this book written by mushroom addicts in the early centuries says so is kind of crazy. They want to be a political force (and they are) but they want to do so by imposing their belief structure on the world as a whole. They believe that they are moral and upright and that their morals and uprightness are how the reat of us should behave. It’s that imposition that annoys the same about the behavior of extremely liberal people, the extremely liberal or lassiez-faire types would allow everyone to behave as they may (within reason) and of course let anarchy reign (in the markets, etc). Both ends of the spectrum, both axioms of ethos, life.

As we (in the north) watch the elections in the south; we should remember these folks, and how often they team up to do their “best” to impose their beliefs on all of us.

As inflation pushes the price of beef beyond the reach of the poor, increased demand for rat meat has pushed up rodent prices. A kilogram of rat meat now costs 5,000 riel (69p) compared with 1,200 riel last year. Spicy field rat dishes with garlic are increasingly on the menu as beef costs 20,000 riel a kilo.

I think that some of our more bizarre foodstuffs must have come from such famines of choice, can you imagine how humans ended up eating crab over cat (at least Europeans)? Lobster seems like an odd choice over, say, rabbit. The spice mentioned in the article must cover up any gamey residue in the meat. If you raise them on the right foods, I bet it could be somewhat tasty, especially after a few generations of selective breeding to breed out the aggression and breed in plumpness.

I’m in the midst of moving the site over to SSL/HTTPS for administration purposes at least. Which means changing my backend security and so on; which proved to be a bear where graphics where relative rather than direct links. Ah well. It’s working now. The Upgrade is working too! I have a valid SSL cert (I think) and it appears to be working.